“Gus. I really don’t think—”
“Father Gus?” a voice calls out. A small man emerges from the tight huddle of NBI and police personnel and comes up to them. He is carrying a large, powerful flashlight in one hand and what looks like a heavy black toolbox in the other.
“Ading? That you?”
Rustia waves his flashlight in response, taking care not to shine the beam directly in their eyes. “Yes, Father.” He moves forward with deliberate slowness, checking the mud around him as he goes. “We’ve got the tracks of a very large vehicle coming up this way. Something like a big bus.”
“Good man. We saw a print or two near the body. Looked like rain boots.”
“Hmmm. Okay. I’ll deal with it. Anything else?”
“Dental elevator.”
“Hmmm. Right. Did you handle anything much?”
“Used gloves and turned the boy over to see the injuries. Otherwise left as much as we could undisturbed.”
Rustia pauses to consider the situation. “Not ideal, but okay. We’ll be extra careful.”
50
It is 11 p.m. on the first Saturday of September.
The cars pull up to the gates of the school: a drab, boxy three-story building with rows of darkened windows—all the same size and shape, all blankly looking out to the school yard like soulless eyes. There’s a spindly flagpole right in front, surrounded by pots of dead or dying shrubbery. The gate has been busted open.
When Saez looks through the car windows at the people in the other NBI vehicles, they’re all staring at the building, as if momentarily frozen. Even Ed and Norman are sitting stock-still, both peering warily through the windshield as though confronted by a colossus.
He finally decides to make the first move, popping the lock on the door with a loud click. “Wish me luck,” he says to Jerome, swinging his long legs out of the car.
The drizzle getting stronger now, the wind picking up speed once more.
“Luck, nothing.” Jerome says it sharply, his expression stern. “We’ll be right behind you.”
Saenz walks forward, his shoes squishing in the mud. As he approaches the gate, it becomes clear that a large vehicle has been rammed through it. The metal tubing, which frames rusty chicken wire, is crushed in places, and there are wide, deep tire tracks in the mud. He glances behind him, just as the other NBI personnel begin leaving their cars.
Valdes approaches Saenz, Jerome following close behind him. “You sure you want to do this?” Valdes asks, and Saenz can sense the concern beneath his usual detachment. “With the boy dead, there’s no reason why we can’t sweep in and make this arrest ourselves.”
“I’m not making an arrest, Jake,” Saenz says quietly. “Look, we have an opportunity here to understand what really happened. Why he killed those boys. What intervention might have prevented him from killing, and at what point. But that can only happen if we bring him out alive. Will you give me your word that you’ll hold off doing anything drastic until there’s no other option left?”
“That’s a promise I can’t make, Father. You know that.”
“Jake. We’ve come this far.”
Before Valdes can answer, they hear the wail of several sirens, and then several police cars, their lights flashing, come screeching up the road, encircling the three NBI cars.
“What’s all this?” Jerome asks.
Confusion, understanding, and finally, anger, flicker across Valdes’s face in rapid succession. “Police backup.”
“Did you ask for that?”
Valdes makes a huffing, impatient sound, then smiles a cynical little nonsmile. “It just arrives sometimes, unasked for.”
Saez understands at once: it’s a turf thing. And right now, not his problem. He turns and begins walking away from them until he has crossed the schoolyard. He can no longer hear their voices. For a moment, he has to reassure himself that the fact that he cannot see Jerome and the others does not mean they are not there.
He glances upward without knowing why. The moon is three-quarters full in a murky sky, broad, grey scars across its sickly, yellow face.
The mobile clinic is parked just outside the gym, beside an old acacia with a gnarled trunk. One side of the converted bus is wedged against the trunk, the metal warped, the windows shattered. It’s clear the vehicle was driven to this spot at high speed, so forcefully that it clipped some of the tree’s lower branches. They lie in a tangled mess on the vehicle’s roof, their wet leaves clinging to its sides and windows like seaweed. In the darkness, it seems to Saenz as though some massive, sinister creature has caught hold of the clinic, wrapping it in a grotesque, unbreakable embrace.
He walks over to the clinic slowly. The soft squish of his shoes in the mud seems too noisy.
The door creaks when he opens it. With a deep breath and a prayer, he takes his first step inside.
Get ready now.
Here he comes here he comes he comes.
51
All the world quiet—the kind of quiet one only hears underwater.
“Alex?” Saenz calls out, and the sound of his voice seems at once loud and muffled to his own ears.
He takes a moment to compose himself and becomes aware of the sound of heavy breathing with a slight asthmatic wheeze to it.
“Come on. I won’t hurt you.”
There is a smell in the mobile clinic—a fishy, rusty sort of smell, and Saenz quickly realizes that it is the smell of blood, and the blood is starting to go bad.
His right foot slides in front of him without his moving it, and he looks down. With his eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, he can tell what the wetness on the vinyl mats is; they are awash with blood.
Pulsing along in time with his heartbeat, split-second snapshots of memory flash strobe-like through Saenz’s consciousness: a body on a gurney, scribblings like fat blue worms on the big whiteboard in the lab, organs in a freezer.
Sitting in the dentist’s chair. Mrs. Bansuy’s turon, warm and sweet. The raw wound in the place of a dead child’s face.
All the little threads and paths leading to this night, this place.
As soon as the camera is set on the tripod and the focus adjusted, Leo allows Joanna to look through the viewfinder. The thought comes to her the moment she sees Saenz’s tall figure framed in the door of the vehicle.
Get the hell out of there, Gus.
Aware of small lumps he can neither see nor identify squishing and oozing beneath the soles of his shoes, Saenz inches forward carefully. He’s so tall that the top of his head grazes the ceiling of the vehicle, forcing him to stoop.
“Alex,” he says again, his voice gentle as the brush of a butterfly’s wing. He can make out the outlines of furniture and equipment in the clinic: a desk, a stool on ball casters, a dentist’s chair, a filing cabinet. He searches for, but does not find, the irregular shape of someone crouching in the shadows.
At the far end of the mobile clinic is a pleated curtain hung on a series of rings. The curtain is drawn. The sound of breathing is coming from behind it.
Saenz sticks his left foot out and drags the stool toward him. He picks it up and holds it in front of his chest with the leg and wheels sticking out, using it as some kind of shield in case Alex springs out from behind the curtain to attack him.
“I know what happened,” he continues. “What was done to you. I want to help.”
The curtain moves, and Saenz ducks to avoid the object that’s been hurled at him: a half-full bottle of ethyl alcohol. It moves again, and a plastic garbage pail lands at his feet. As far as Saenz can tell, it’s filled with blood-soaked rags, but he doesn’t look too closely. He’s almost certain there’s something else in there that he doesn’t want to see.
“I think I know what he told you,” he says. “That you were his special little boy. That it would be fun. That’s what pe
ople like him do. They try to gain your trust so that they can do terrible things to you.”
“Go to hell.” The voice is small, frightened, hoarse, and the words hang in the clotted air, in this small space, in the thick dark.
“I think he tried to frighten you too. I think he told you that he would find a way to hurt your mother and father if you didn’t do what he asked.”
There is another odor in the tortured air, and the priest recognizes it as the faint scent of urine. A thin blade of fear, cold like surgical steel in the brain, slices through the priest’s consciousness. Alex Carlos has never been more dangerous than he is at this moment. Saenz decides then and there that he won’t try to move any closer. He’s conscious now of movement near the mobile clinic, of shadows scurrying outside the windows.
Extraordinary measures, the director had said.
There’s no time to waste; he has to draw Alex out, fast.
“We talked to them. Your mother. Your father.”
“You stay away from them,” Alex snarls at him.
“They want to see you again. They feel bad that they couldn’t help you then. But they want to help you now.”
“Shut up. Shut up.”
“Come on, Alex. Can’t you see? You’ve become a little bit like him already. Is that what you wanted?” Saenz waits for a response; when it doesn’t come, he continues. “I don’t think so. I think the last thing you want is to be anything like him.”
“I’m nothing like him,” Alex says savagely from behind the curtain.
“I know you’re not. So please. Come out with me now. Let us try to help. You can put him behind you, and this will all stop.”
The curtain moves a third time, the plastic rings clacking against the rail as Alex draws the fabric back.
He is shirtless and barefoot, his face, torso and arms stained with blood. His jeans are matted to his thighs.
“I can’t put it behind me,” he whimpers.
“Yes, you can. It can be fixed.”
“How can I fix this?” he screams, hurling something at Saenz’s feet. Saenz flinches as it lands on the vinyl matting with a wet, slapping sound. “You tell me, Father, how do I fix this?”
Saenz doesn’t have to look at it to know what it is.
“You can’t bring them back, Alex; you and I know that. But you can heal yourself. Just a little bit, every day. You can regain what he took from you. You can atone for what you took from others.”
Alex sits down on his haunches, clutching his bare stomach with one hand. “You really think they will let you help me, Father? That’s not how this world works.” He begins rocking back and forth on his heels. “I tried to tell people, but nobody listened, nobody wanted to know. They wanted me to keep quiet. I didn’t matter. None of us mattered to anyone.”
“You matter. Here and now, I am telling you: what happened to you still matters.”
But Alex goes on, as though he hasn’t heard Saenz. “That’s what’s going to happen, too, when I walk out that door. Nobody wants to know the truth.”
“I want to know.” Saenz holds out a hand to him. “I will listen.”
Saenz can tell that Alex is torn between staying and taking the hand offered to him. “Let’s go,” he says, as if it’s a foregone conclusion, allowing a bright note of optimism to creep into his voice.
Alex rises to his feet and begins to walk toward him. Saenz waits until he is inches away and looks first at his hands—both empty—and then at his face, streaked with blood and tears, the features delicate as a bird’s. And he’s filled with an irrational anger: at Gorospe, at the parents, at the school—surely someone must have suspected or known something—at everything that has brought Alex Carlos to this place.
“Let me walk ahead of you, okay?” Saenz says, and Alex nods meekly.
It’s only a few short steps to the door, and Saenz shouts, “We’re coming out!”
He’s only taken one step down from the bus when he feels it: a puff of air against his ear, followed by a burning sensation.
He turns around in time to see Alex staring down at a hole in his own left side, below the breastbone, the wrath blooming in his face, the sudden flash of a blade in a hand that was empty just seconds ago.
“What the hell is going on?” Valdes shouts into his two-way radio, dragging Jerome behind one of their cars for cover. “Who fired that shot? Arcinas, that’d better not be any of your boys!”
The radio crackles, and then it’s Arcinas, breathless, panicky. “It wasn’t us, I swear! Not with our own men moving around that bus!”
“Well, who was it, then?”
Jerome looks up in time to see Saenz tipping backward into the mud and Alex Carlos falling upon him in a fit of rage.
“Gus!” Jerome shouts, and tries to get back on his feet, but more shots are fired, and Valdes drags him back down to safety.
Alex’s shrill cries fill Saenz’s ears, and he feels a cold slashing pain, first on his arm, then on his shoulder, then in a diagonal line down his chest. He falls backward out of the mobile clinic, into the mud, and sees Alex’s thin figure leap out after him.
He flops over on his stomach, tries to crawl quickly away, but he feels the other man’s weight on his back.
“I told you! I told you this would happen!” Alex screams, his mouth close to Saenz’s ear. He’s straddling Saenz’s back, pulling his head up off the ground by grabbing a handful of his hair.
As he tries to push Alex off his back, Saenz can hear other voices around them shouting, the staccato popping of guns being fired.
“Stop,” he tries to shout, “stop firing!” But he can only manage a strangled cry.
Joanna drags Leo forward, grabbing the rest of his equipment, battery pack and extra tapes so that his hands will be left free to manipulate the heavy camera. They find a clear spot, set up their gear quickly. They hear the sound of gunfire and now angry voices. “Leo, what’s going on?” she asks him.
Leo steps aside so she can look. She sees a flurry of motion near the school gates. She pans to the right and spots what she believes to be a number of plainclothes NBI agents swooping down on the mobile clinic. A small adjustment and now she’s looking at the door of the clinic, where two figures seem to be struggling with each other. Everything is happening so fast.
When she zooms in to get a closer look, she finds herself staring straight into the face of Alex Carlos, the hatred on it so powerful and terrible that she feels it almost as a kind of heat, sucked up through the viewfinder and blasting on her own face. Saenz, crawling on his belly in the mud, is trying to claw away from him, but he’s very strong. He flips Saenz on his back and raises his hand high above his head.
“Jesus, no,” Joanna says when she sees that he’s holding a knife.
. . . beast you beast you animal . . .
Saenz hears this unnatural, high, hoarse shriek again and again as the blade flashes above him, stark against the night sky, slashing once, twice. He tries to fight him off, to shield his face and body with his arms. He manages to grab Alex’s wrists, but his hands are slippery with blood, and Alex twists easily out of his grasp.
I told you but you wouldn’t listen! I told you I didn’t like it. I didn’t want any of it. I. Didn’t. Want. It.
The face above him is contorted with fury. The world begins to slow down, and Alex’s screams slide lower and lower down the scale to a mere rumble in his ears.
He tries to see if help is coming, help me now help quick, sees a pale blur moving fast and close to the ground a few yards away from his tilted head: Jerome rushing toward him, and then a few other men, their heavy feet spattering mud.
Before he slips into the soft, welcoming dark, he sees a flash, then two, then more, in rapid succession like lightning, hears two loud, muffled explosions and Jerome’s voice shouting no, stop, wait, and then all sound and pain and
scarred yellow moon fall away.
This really hurts.
But I’ve killed you at last, haven’t I? All of you. I know all your faces.
Can’t you see? You all look like me. We’re all the same to him, to all of them. After we’re used up, we’re thrown away.
And you were wrong, all of you.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t want any of it.
I. Didn’t. Want. It.
That’s right. Go back into the shadows now. Stay quiet. Give me the
peace I deserve.
It’s so cold. I’m really sleepy all of a sudden. The pain should keep me awake, but I guess not
not this time
mama papa so sorry
so sleepy so quiet it’s about
time
52
Saenz drifts in and out of consciousness. He hears hushed voices, can tell when he’s alone in the room and when he’s not. He struggles to wake, but in the infrequent moments when he does wake, all he wants to do is fall back asleep. His limbs feel weighted with lead, and there is a large, numb ball of nothing where his stomach and chest should be. Night, day—he can’t tell which is which. The blinds on the windows are always drawn.
He dreams uneasily. Father Ramirez visits in one of those dreams, his bald head gleaming under the light of the ceiling lamp. In the dream, Ramirez is talking to him, kindly and reassuring, but there’s something in his eyes that frightens him. The monsignor lifts up the blanket, his fleshy hands clammy, and he’s still talking, talking, friendly and gentle. Saenz kicks and flails, but his limbs are heavy, so heavy, and the monsignor whispers in his ear: It’s all right. It’s going to be all right. This will make you feel better. This will be our secret.
And Saenz shouts, Not in my Church! No secrets in my Church! he protests, as he feels hands crawling up his legs, up his thighs. And he realizes that he is screaming in Alex Carlos’s voice.
The good monsignor only laughs.
Smaller and Smaller Circles Page 27